In an aside Jesse referred to the problem that the "Alphas" are currently hidden away from the general community and that he would like to address this at a subsequent ReleaseEngineering meeting.

In an aside Jesse referred to the problem that the "Alphas" are currently hidden away from the general community and that he would like to address this at a subsequent ReleaseEngineering meeting.

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{{Anchor|Infrastructure}}

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== Infrastructure ==

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This section contains the discussion happening on the fedora-infrastructure-list

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http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure

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Contributing Writer: HuzaifaSidhpurwala

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=== Email aliases and new cvs requests ===

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Toshio Kuratomi writes for fedora-infrastructure-list [1]

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Last week Seth implemented email aliases for the people who should be notified of changes to packages. Toshio used this new functionality to have getnotifylist, which looks up who to notify on cvs commits, stop querying the pkgdb directly (a slow operation with multiple points where it could fail) and instead just construct the alias from the packagename.

While this was intended to be a primary discussion point for the Infrastructure meeting there was a little bit of discussion first in #fedora-admin, and then in #fedora-meeting regarding Zabbix, a tool like Nagios that Nigel begun to setup for testing this week.

Fedora Weekly News Issue 137

Fedora Weekly News keeps you updated with the latest issues, events and activities in the Fedora community.

We are pleased to present a new beat on Virtualization issues and developments brought to you by beat writer Dale Bewley. In Developments we report on "How Maintainers Can Help Reduce XULRunner Breakage". In Announcements we reveal the Fedora 10 codename. In Artwork we examine "The Blue Color of Fedora". In Security Advisories, another new beat authored by David Nalley we run through the week's important updates. We are also saddened to announce the departure of Thomas Chung from the editorial chair, but heartened to be working as a new editorial team consisting of Pascal Calarco, Oisin Feeley and Huzaifa Sidhpurwala.

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. Being a Fedora Weekly News beat writer gives you a chance to work on one of our community's most important sources of news. Ideas for new beats are always welcome -- let us know how you'd like to contribute.

We are still looking for a beat writer to summarize the Fedora Events and Meetings that happened during each week.

Fedora 10 (Cambridge)

Josh Boyer informed us[0] that "Cambridge" was the winning name in the Fedora 10 naming election. Jeremy Katz wrote[1] on his blog that "Cambridge" was the original Red Hat Linux 10 codename, which was the release that eventually became Fedora Core 1.

Ambassadors

Help Wanted: LinuxWorld San Francisco

Karsten Wade put out a help wanted call [1] for the Fedora booth at LinuxWorld San Francisco. If you are in the area and wnat to help out, please check the mailing list post [1] for details or the wiki page [2].

Event Report: Palmetto Open Source Software Conference

David Nalley posted [1] his event report covering the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference. This was a first year event and included a talk by Greg DeKoenigsberg and included an imprompt Fedora booth.

Developments

How Maintainers Can Help Reduce XULRunner Breakage

The recent breakage of many packages which depend on xulrunner (see FWN#136 "XULRunner Security Update Breakage Stimulates Bodhi Discussion"[1]) was addressed[2] in a post by Will Woods. Will reported that a QA meeting involving Christopher Aillon (caillon), as Firefox/XULRunner maintainer, had investigated the problem and produced an explanation and some recommendations for other package maintainers. As Christopher was unavailable for a week Will was relaying the information in the hope that some fixes could be made in his absence.

The reason that some xulrunner-dependent packages were affected and others not was that xulrunner provides both a stable API gecko-devel and an unstable API gecko-devel-unstable. Will noted that BuildRequires of xulrunner-devel or xulrunner-devel-unstable should no longer be used and instead that gecko equivalents should replace them.

Packages using the stable API were unaffected by the update of xulrunner. Will stated that "[t]he unstable API could change at any time, so if your app is using the unstable API it must be rebuilt *every time* xulrunner is updated." It was recommended that packages that used the stable API should use the following in their specfiles:

Lastly an important request was made of package maintainers: "if your package uses the -unstable API, please send caillon redhat com a note, and *please* consider adding him to the ACL (or opening it entirely). He keeps tabs on all packages requiring the unstable API so they can all be rebuilt for each security update."

Braden McDaniel wondered[3] why the same headers, but with different pathnames, were provided by xulrunner-devel-unstable and xulrunner-devel and Ville-PekkaVainio had[4] the same question.

In response to the suggested BuildRequires Douglas Warner requested[5] that a Provides: gecko-libs-api = 1.9 be added to xulrunner so that dependent packages would break if xulrunner were bumped to a new version which was not compatible: "For example, I can't do: Requires: gecko-libs < 2.0 Because I'm not guaranteed that the next version will *be* 2.0 (it might be 1.10, for example)." Rex Dieter independently came[6] to the same conclusion. Denis Leroy begged[7] that xulrunner would use "libtool-style soname versions like all other libraries in Fedora? So we don't need to add the version numbers in the spec file in the first place." Denis thought that xulrunner would fail a standard Fedora package review.

NEVR Again

Another report detailing broken upgrade paths was posted[1] by Jesse Keating's script (see FWN#136 "Broken Upgrade Paths Due to NEVR"[2]). This time it reported those packages which failed the path "f8-final -> dist-f8-updates -> dist-f8-updates-testing -> dist-f9-updates -> dist-f9-updates-testing -> dist-f10" and seventy-eight packages were listed. Also included as per last week's discussion was an ordering of the list per-builder as opposed to per-owner. Jesse requested[3] feedback from recipients of the automated email warnings if problems are encountered.

Stephen Warren was concerned[4] that the upgrade path did not include the GA release of dist-f9: "Shouldn't dist-f9-final (or whatever the correct name is) be inserted in this path list between dist-f8-updates-testing and dist-f9- updates?" This led to an interesting exchange with Kevin Kofler who argued[5] that the converse should be expected and it was desirable that updates to Fedora 8 would have higher EVRs than the packages which were released for "dist-f9". Stephen argued[6] that it would make it easier to backport fixes if bumping of the release number rather than the version number were preferred and suggested changing what he understood to be Fedora's policies. KevinKofler disagreed[7] both with Stephen's description of current Fedora practices and also with his desire to reduce version bumps. He listed several situations in which these bumps would be useful and suggested that it was such version upgrades which uniquely distinguished Fedora from Debian "stable" or Red Hat EL.

The possibility that simultaneous updates would be released to all branches was discussed[8] by Kevin Kofler and Jesse Keating. Although Jesse thought this was a corner case and that it was best to let the maintainer decide Kevin was motivated[9] to write a patch as it was in his experience a common problem. Kevin thought that if Jesse wanted to avoid spamming maintainers with bogus reports then his patch would remove about thirty-nine percent of the volume. Jesse was grateful and excused[10] himself from looking at the patch for a week due to the pressure of releasing the alpha of Fedora 10.

Slimming Down Java by Sub-Packaging AOT

A request to separate out the AOT[1] parts of Java packages into sub-packages was made[2] by Caolan McNamara. He estimated that it would be possible to remove circa 45 Mb (in /usr/lib/gcj) as OpenJDK tended to be installed anyway due to the web plugin.

[1] AOT stands for Ahead-Of-Time. This refers to the static compilation of the program to produce native code which runs without the potential run-time performance hit imposed by JIT. JIT stands for Just-In-Time and refers to dynamic compilation of each method of a Java program immediately before execution. Although there are techniques to speed up JIT, by identifying "hot" frequently called methods and caching them[2a], in general it is believed to be sub-optimal for GUI-based programs.

Andrew Haley and Andrew Overholt expressed[3] skepticism that users would realize that they needed the gcj AOT-compiled code in order to get good performance. Andrew Overholt stated "one of the reasons we didn't do this to begin with was because RPM has no notion of Suggests or Recommends like dpkg does. Debian went this route, but I've seen reports of people not realizing they needed to install the associated -gcj package."

The advantages of maintaining both AOT and JIT compilation were argued[4] by Colin Walters. Among the reasons listed by Colin for keeping a JIT were: "many apps will continue to load code at runtime from sources that are not Fedora. Think unpackaged Eclipse plugins for just a start" and that "[a] JIT also has a lot more interesting information than a normal AOT model. Hotspot does a lot of cool things there." Colin suggested that "profile driven optimizations",based on work done in 2001 by JanHubicka (SuSE), Richard Henderson (Red Hat) and AndreasJaeger (SuSE), might be a way to improve the performance of JITted programs. On the other hand he recognized that AOT compilation was useful "because having Hotspot re-profile and recompile the Eclipse core on everyone's computer is a bit of a waste." Colin followed up[5] with a putative infrastructure plan involving modifying Koji to create a new repository of optimized versions of select applications and a YUM plugin which feeds HotSpot profile data from individuals back to a central server which in turn is used to further optimize the compilations. Jeff Spaleta wanted[6] to know if this new repository would be disabled by default. Toshio Kuratomi was concerned[7] that Koji should maintain its ability to create a precisely audited build.

Rawhide Network Breakage Due to Wireless Drivers

A puzzled Richard Jones asked[1] if anyone else had experienced bizarre networking failures apparently due to DNS lookup failures for web browsers but not for command line tools. Several confirmations were posted and Dan Williams warned[2] that "all mac80211-based drivers (b43, b43-legacy, iwl3945, iwl4965, ath5k, rt2x00)" were broken due to upstream patching of multiqueue functionality.

Ralf Etzinger asked[3] if failure to associate with an Access Point was one of those expected pieces of "random weirdness." In response to a follow-up question from Michael Solberg about a failure to associate using kernel-2.6.25.10-47.fc8 Dan added[4] that only Rawhide kernels should be affected.

Possible Slippage of Fedora 10 Alpha?

A brief note from Jesse Keating on Friday requested[1] an IRC meeting with spin owners, QA, Kernel and other concerned parties to discuss the problem that "split media"[2] was not working currently. As the Alpha release is scheduled[3] for August 5th it seems as though there is little time to solve this problem.

Infrastructure

Email aliases and new cvs requests

Toshio Kuratomi writes for fedora-infrastructure-list [1]

Last week Seth implemented email aliases for the people who should be notified of changes to packages. Toshio used this new functionality to have getnotifylist, which looks up who to notify on cvs commits, stop querying the pkgdb directly (a slow operation with multiple points where it could fail) and instead just construct the alias from the packagename.

YUM security issues...

Toshio Kuratomi writes for fedora-infrastructure-list [2]

This is a re-post from Josh Bressers. Justin asked if the ability for mirror admins to select a
subnet where they'll serve all of the traffic has been removed? There is a particular concern about this issue in the short term. There is a paper about this also [3]

Server Monitoring - A replacement for Nagios?

Nigel Jones writes for fedora-infrastructure-list [5]

While this was intended to be a primary discussion point for the Infrastructure meeting there was a little bit of discussion first in #fedora-admin, and then in #fedora-meeting regarding Zabbix, a tool like Nagios that Nigel begun to setup for testing this week.

Artwork

New Posters Needed for Fedora

Paul Frields asked[1] on @fedora-art-list about a new series of posters:
"'Infinity / Freedom / Voice' has been a powerful message and an excellent way to characterize the themes that went into the Fedora logo. The logo has become a completely identifiable brand for us, and the original 'triptych' posters for these themes have allowed our brand to grow throughout the community. Now, it's time for us to build a revitalized message around the more concrete themes that characterize the entire Fedora Project as a whole."

Mairín Duffy came up[2] with a concept fitting one of the Fedora 10 theme proposals: "I'm wondering if this could be tied into the F10 artwork theme.... I've been sketching up some steampunky doodles lately. Maybe I'll do some along these lines. Here are some steampunk-inspired ideas" (following with a list of ideas[2]) and after receiving positive feedback even with a graphic sketch [3].

A T-shirt Design for the Upcoming FUDCon in Brno

Max Spevack asked[1] on @fedora-art-list for a T-shirt design for the Brno FUDCon: "Since you guys did such an awesome job on the FUDCon Boston shirts, I was wondering if you'd be willing to make a few mock-ups of what a FUDCon Brno shirt would look like. I like the idea of trying to have a bit of design consistency for each year's FUDCon shirts... so maybe we could keep the front the same (switching the name of course) and doing something 'similar' on the back?"

The request was quickly followed[2] by a design by Nicu Buculei using, as requested, the same template as the recent FUDCon in Boston, a design which is generally liked. The discuss touched[3] on a hunt for usable Brno photos and a number of pieces of technical advice[4] from Mairín Duffy about vectorizing photos.

The Blue Color of Fedora

Paul Frields started an interesting debate[1] about the dominant color used in Fedora graphics: "Does the Artwork team think, overall, that using a blue palette for our desktop theme (background) helps Fedora with its identity and branding? Do you want to continue that for Fedora 10?"

A large chorus of contributors to the Art Team expressed their support for using blue, one of the most convincing arguments came from Max Spevack[2]:"Blue = Fedora. Mix in some other stuff as appropriate, but I believe that Blue is now 'our' color. We shouldn't give that up. Ubuntu has brown, OpenSuse has green. Red Hat has red. We have blue. Personally, I like that we maintain that general blue-ish feel. Play with the shades if you like, mix in some spice and variety if you like, but I think Fedora should always be identifiable with the color blue."

Of course there are different opinions, like the one voiced[3] by David Nielsen: "As a user I would love to see us break free of the blue prison, it looks dated and should be put down with all manners of mercy possible. I think it hurts us to stick with the blue theme and unlike other competing distros not work towards a unified look over several cycles."

Enterprise Management Tools List

Virt-install Remote Guest Creation

Cole Robinson took[1] a stab at implementing remote guest creation in virt-install. The main unresolved issue was storage. How to detect it and how to allow the user to specify it. Michael DeHaan was interested[2] in teaching koan to install on remote hosts and also focused on the question of storage specification.

Fedora Xen List

kernel-xen is Dead

Mark McLoughlin wrote[1] to say the kernel-xen package is dead. That is to say the kernel package can now support x86 and x86_64 domU guests and kernel-xen will be dropped from Rawhide. Hiding between those lines is the fact that there is currently no Dom0 kernel in Fedora 9 or Rawhide. Without such a Dom0 kernel a domU must be booted via a paravirt_ops kernel or with the KVM-based xenner.

The conversation then turned to the matter of migrating away from Xen and support for systems without hardware virtualization. Paul Wouters asked[2] if there was a howto for migration to KVM. It seemed there is not, but all are encouraged to provide one.

Alain Williams realized that Fedora 9 has no Dom0 support after installing it. When he asked why Mark McLoughlin pointed[3] out the problems with kernel-xen being based on a much older kernel than kernel creating a time sink, so the decision was made to re-base to the upstream kernel which supports paravirt_ops. This decision was first announced[4] back in Nov 2007 by Daniel Berrange. Mark McLoughlin also stated[3] that Dom0 support at Fedora 10 launch looks unlikely. Fortunately we have more positive news on that front below.

Dale Bewley bemoaned[5] the fact that he has no budget to upgrade to HVM capable hardware and will have to stick on Fedora 8 until Fedora 10 has Dom0 support. Stephen Smoogen pointed[6] out that RHEL5 and CentOS5 are options for Dom0 on non-HVM hardware. Daniel Berrange expressed[7] some empathy and the desire for such support, but reiterated it isn't viable until Dom0 is ported to pv_ops.

State of Xen in Upstream Linux

Pasi Kärkkäinen thoughtfully forwarded[1] a long detailed xen kernel status message which was sent to the @xen-devel-list by Jeremy Fitzhardinge. Jeremy pointed out that mainline kernel is at 2.6.27-rc1 and his current patch stack is pretty much empty after being merged into linux-2.6.git.

Jeremy stated that Fedora 9's kernel-xen package was based on the mainline kernel even though it's been a separate package. Now that kernel-xen has been dropped from rawhide there will be only one kernel package in Fedora 10. Jeremy said his focus in the next kernel development window will be obvious missing dom0 support with the hope it will be merged into 2.6.28. That work will likely take place in a xen.git on Xen.org. Jeremy then provided his long TODO list with a request for help fullfilling it. In addition he asked what's missing.

Creating Multiple Xen Bridges

Andy Burns asked[1] for a clean way to utilize the two NICs in a Dom0 server as multiple bridges. Kanwar Sandhu recommended[2] editing xend-config.sxp to utilize a very small custom network-bridge-wrapper script also provided in the post. Another option pointed[3] out on the list was to short-circuit xend-config.sxp and configure all networking by hand in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.

Libvirt List

PATCH: Storage Pool Discovery

David Lively refered[1] to a post[2] on "Storage Management APIs" by Daniel Berrange when he posted a patch to implement virConnectDiscoverStoragePools. As the API continues to be solidified, this patch implements discovery for only logical and netfs storage pools.

PATCH: Fix Setting of Bridge Forward-delay

Christoph Höger described[1] a problem which caused a bridge to not pass traffic for a number of seconds after activation. Just a few minutes later Daniel Berrange posted[2] a fix for a bug which caused libvirt to ignore the forwarding delay when it was set to 0. The workaround in the meantime is to set fd=1.

Daniel Veillard plus-oned[3] that patch and expressed that with the last release having been on June 25th, it may be time for a new release. Daniel Berrange mentioned[4] that the Xen & QEMU refactoring needs more testing, and the LXC and OpenVZ drivers need porting to the new XML routines. Richard W.M. Jones wanted[5] to get virsh edit in. The last word[6] was to delay another week.